Director - Product Design

What you will own:
Design Vision & Strategy:
- Define and own the product design vision across all of surfaces - editor, platform, APIs, and consumer touchpoints
- Translate complex product and business goals into coherent, elegant design strategies that scale
- Drive a consistent, high-quality design language and evolve design system as the product grows
- Lead long-term UX strategy for AI-native interaction paradigms - designing for uncertainty, latency, and generative outputs
- Establish and champion a design culture of rigour, craft, and user advocacy across the company
Team Leadership & People Management:
- Hire, mentor, and grow a team of UX designers, UI designers, and user researchers
- Create clear growth paths and foster a feedback-rich culture that makes designers better every quarter
- Conduct regular design reviews, provide high-quality critique, and set the bar for what great looks like
- Partner with design leads to delegate ownership without losing coherence across the team's output
- Champion psychological safety and inclusion in design decision-making
Hands-On Design & Craft:
- Lead design for flagship features and complex UX challenges - actively contributing wireframes, prototypes, and spec-ready flows
- Own the design of core 3D and AI-powered workflows: AI scene generation, asset manipulation, real-time previewing, and spatial editing
- Produce and review high-fidelity prototypes to validate interaction patterns before engineering investment
- Maintain and evolve component library and design system in Figma, ensuring adoption across teams
- Design for accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) as a baseline standard, not an afterthought
User Research & Insight:
- Define and drive a mixed-methods user research practice: usability testing, contextual inquiry, surveys, and analytics-led discovery
- Synthesize qualitative and quantitative signals into clear, actionable design insights
- Partner with PMs to establish success metrics for design: task completion, error rates, time-on-task, CSAT, and NPS
- Embed continuous feedback loops from production usage into the design iteration cycle
- Conduct competitive UX audits across 3D creation tools, AI productivity apps, and enterprise SaaS platforms

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Leadership:
- Partner deeply with Product Management to co-own the product roadmap - design should shape prioritisation, not just execute it
- Collaborate with Engineering to ensure design feasibility, maintain quality during implementation, and influence frontend architecture decisions
- Communicate design decisions and tradeoffs clearly to executive stakeholders - with rationale grounded in user data
- Represent design strategy in investor, partner, and enterprise customer conversations
- Drive launch readiness from a design perspective: documentation, handoff quality, and post-launch design QA
Tools and Technical Stack:
Design & Prototyping:
- Figma (primary) - components, auto-layout, variants, Dev Mode, and collaborative design workflows
- Framer, ProtoPie, or Principle for advanced interaction prototyping
- Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop) for visual asset creation
- Spline or equivalent for 3D design exploration and web-ready 3D UI elements
Research & Testing:
- UserTesting, Maze, Hotjar, or FullStory for usability testing and session analytics
- Dovetail or Notion for research synthesis and insight management
- Mixpanel, Amplitude, or PostHog for behavioural analytics and funnel analysis
Design Systems & Handoff:
- Figma Tokens or Style Dictionary for design token management
- Storybook for design-engineering alignment on component behaviour
- Zeroheight or Notion for design system documentation
Collaboration:
- Linear for project and sprint tracking
- Slack, Loom, and Notion for async communication and documentation
- GitHub (read-level comfort) - able to review implementation and file design-related issues
What we are looking for:
Must-Haves
- 7+ years of product design experience, including 2+ years in a design leadership or management role
- A portfolio that demonstrates both exceptional craft and strategic design thinking - at system level and interaction level
- Proven experience building and scaling design teams - hiring, mentoring, and growing designers at different career stages
- Deep expertise in UX methodology: end-to-end design process from discovery through delivery and iteration
- Mastery of Figma and modern design tooling - you are faster and more thorough with tools than most
- Strong written and verbal communication - you can defend design decisions with clarity and receive critique constructively
- Experience designing complex, data-rich, or technical products - SaaS platforms, developer tools, or productivity applications
- Track record of partnering with PMs and engineers at a senior level, influencing roadmap and technical decisions through design
- Comfort with ambiguity - you know how to make principled design decisions in fast-moving environments with incomplete information
Highly Desirable:
- Experience designing 3D tools, WebGL interfaces, spatial computing products, or AR/VR applications
- Familiarity with AI-native product design - crafting UX for generative outputs, uncertainty states, and model latency
- Exposure to real-time or collaborative product experiences (e.g., Figma-like multiplayer, live preview environments)
- Background in e-commerce, retail tech, or product visualisation at scale
- Experience contributing to or building open-source design systems
- Prior startup experience: comfort with zero-to-one design at speed alongside structured scaling
- Basic front-end literacy (HTML/CSS/JS) - enough to understand implementation constraints and engage meaningfully with engineers
- Published writing, talks, or portfolio case studies that demonstrate thought leadership in UX or product design
Design Challenges you will Tackle:
- Designing intuitive UX for 3D scene editing - making spatial manipulation accessible to non-technical users without sacrificing power
- Building AI-native interaction patterns for generative 3D: prompt inputs, output previews, iteration loops, and error recovery
- Scaling a design system that works across a 3D web editor, a mobile AR viewer, an enterprise dashboard, and developer-facing APIs
- Designing for trust in AI-assisted workflows - where the model may produce surprising or imperfect outputs
- Balancing visual fidelity and real-time performance constraints in WebGL and spatial environments
- Creating design processes that support a fast-moving engineering team without becoming a bottleneck
- Establishing UX standards for a category that is still being defined - there are no obvious playbooks for AI-powered 3D creation